This is the tiny grey home, with its crooked concrete steps and gravel driveway. At the end of the street, we are the dead-end straddling the railroad tracks. We still stay on one side; that walk was only for daylight.
Chaos-filled garage, a hoarders den, a dumpster hunter’s lodge of drying dead flowers and creative hodgepodge. Embarrassing, close the door! I am coming home with more.
Vacuumed lines perpendicular to rug runner’s fringe. Organized themes are sectioned off. Too much, too imposing. Sensory overload, needs unloading. Smoke, yellow walls pending.
But freedom! Freedom to be…holed up in my room, we circle the writing, the work, the plume. Responsible despite no responsibilities. We race with ourselves growing up faster than need be. Hitch ditch gang bang slang -& this is on the weekdays
The weekends are everything and everyone. Ones I don’t know but want to know me. This house is the place to be. I even screamed from my front porch ‘please leave’, as more descend down my street.
Lots of people elbow to elbow, can’t swing a punch. No room to fight one another; there is nothing here to steal or fight for. If something should break and you are afraid, it was a prop anyway. The joke was on you.
Respect for this place, respect for its reputation. To show up, to show off. We perform and we dress up and we mime those things we can’t outside. We are shocking and we are each other’s shock absorbers.
Full of cramped comfort, full of no rules or requirements, where we are shoving in to shove in more. We are restricted by one thing. Only in this place, we must stay. Now I take your keys.
We are sectioned under the tiniest roof and the longest yard, where we billow out when the falling walls can’t hold us in. There are no walls. Everyone here has colored outside the lines, even the Mormon one, one time.
We are loud, our music is loud; all types. It escalates and we stand and sing. The ones who linger know there is the floor. Around you things are straightened by morning, no trace. The quiet, the new sunlight.
The leftovers linger, and there is little to feed you, but everyone leaves here fed.
You! get to leave, but wanted to be here every time. You are free to leave behind the swampland, the stench, the backyard footprints tracked back in.
Our lines are aligned and pillows fluffed and we return to the tidy cover-up.
Camden House was never called the home.
It was too decrepit and we were still growing. Your foundation was uneven and even the oldest amongst us were still trying to find our feet, our voice, our personalities. Everything here brought out our insecurities, and we did everything here to not show it. We always made a show of it. We came alive here, but we never thrived here.
The home was yet to come. And it came. And it caved in, too.